


something old, something new

by RoamingSignals



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Drabble, M/M, Post-Relationship, gays who are not afraid of commitment, idk if it counts as a drabble because i haven't checked the word count but for me it's a drabble, pre-relationship also?, pseudo engagement, short fic, they're in love!!!!!!!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-21
Updated: 2021-02-21
Packaged: 2021-03-17 23:42:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29600544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoamingSignals/pseuds/RoamingSignals
Summary: Taeil finds the engagement ring in his sock drawer, wrapped up neatly in a pair of novelty boxers, and thinks this is a good memory. He remembers shopping for it, purchasing it, tucking it away for safekeeping. He smiles as he reads the engraving. There’s dust on the velvet box when he snaps it shut.The next morning he puts it in an envelope and takes it to the post office.
Relationships: Lee Donghyuck | Haechan/Moon Taeil
Comments: 31
Kudos: 224





	something old, something new

**Author's Note:**

> hello i'm a little drunk i wrote this when i was not drunk, purposefully forgot about it, and now that i am a little durnk i am unstoppable and you have to deal with this
> 
> i don't know what this is because i didn't read it
> 
> unbetad surprise!!!! hyuckil supremacy or something!!!!

Taeil finds the engagement ring in his sock drawer, wrapped up neatly in a pair of novelty boxers, and thinks _this is a good memory._ He remembers shopping for it, purchasing it, tucking it away for safekeeping. He smiles as he reads the engraving. There’s dust on the velvet box when he snaps it shut.

The next morning he puts it in an envelope and takes it to the post office. The ring was never meant to stay in his drawer anyway.

That’s the last he thinks of it.

He doesn’t think to check the post to make sure it arrived safely. The money spent on the ring is gone. Taeil would never have returned it — he doesn’t know that he’d be able to, but he certainly wouldn’t have wanted to — so whether it gets lost or not doesn’t matter.

But it does arrive. Two weeks (or seventeen days, to be specific) after Taeil hands it over to the postman, it arrives at Donghyuck’s front door halfway around the world and turns everything on its head.

Halfway across the world, the ring is carefully pried from its bed and Donghyuck runs his thumb across the engraving. _My only sunshine._ Donghyuck hasn’t thought about those words in over a year.

Texts are frantically sent, tickets are hastily bought, and still — Taeil doesn’t think about the ring at all.

So he’s very confused when there is a knock on his apartment door and a flustered Donghyuck on his doorstep, three weeks (or twenty days, to be specific) after Taeil has handed off the ring to the postman.

“Oh.” Taeil stares. He can’t help staring. It’s like seeing a ghost, one that’s more alive than anyone has any right to be. “Hello.”

Donghyuck looks little different than he had a year ago, when Taeil sent him off at the airport. His hair is a little longer, dyed a darker brown, and his cheeks are not so round. He’s not any taller, but he stands straighter. His posture is better, but perhaps that’s the nerves.

It’s been a very long time since Taeil has seen Donghyuck nervous.

It’s been a very long time since Taeil has seen Donghyuck at all.

Donghyuck hovers in the doorway, as though he knows he is a ghost and needs to be invited inside. “Hi.” His eyes roam over Taeil’s face and body and apartment and then back to his face. There’s something clenched in his hand. “Hyung.”

Taeil grins. “What are you doing here?” Donghyuck has not returned to Korea in some time.

“I…” Donghyuck looks more than nervous now — he looks unsure. Taeil is too busy soaking in Donghyuck to notice the enormous blue suitcase at his feet even as Donghyuck nearly trips over it. “Hyung...didn’t you want me to come?”

“Of course I wanted you to come,” Taeil says, because it’s the truth. Taeil has wanted Donghyuck to come home since the day he left. “I would never have asked you to.”

Donghyuck’s mouth sets in a mullish line. “Then what was this?” He holds out his palm and Taeil sees a velvet box, no longer dusty.

“Oh.” Taeil frowns, because he thought it would have been obvious. “It’s an engagement ring.”

“Yes.” Donghyuck nods.

“It’s yours,” Taeil tells him, like it’s simple. Because it is. It was. “It was always meant to be yours.”

Donghyuck is still standing in the doorway. He chews his lip to ribbons. The weather is too cold. His nose is red and his hands are chapped. “How long have you had it?”

Taeil sighs. “A long time,” he admits, as casually as he can. It isn’t embarrassing to tell Donghyuck that their engagement was playing on a reel through his mind for the months before Donghyuck got the job opportunity in America. It’s not embarrassing to admit that he regretted never handing the ring over anyway.

(It hurts, just a little, but it is never embarrassing.)

Donghyuck is still waiting for an answer.

“I bought it in the summer,” Taeil says, “before you left.”

Donghyuck left at Christmas time. Taeil remembers Donghyuck kissing him under the mistletoe for the last time. One final good memory.

“And why did you send it to me now?” Donghyuck asks.

Taeil puts the pieces together and finds his stomach sinking, titanic. “Because I found it.”

Still in the doorway, Donghyuck is hit by a rush of clarity. He moves forward, and when Taeil moves aside Donghyuck brushes past him into the apartment, leaving his suitcase on the doorstep. Taeil looks at it now and finds that it’s packed for much more than a day trip.

He isn’t sure what kind of day trip Chicago to Seoul would be anyway.

Taeil waddles with the suitcase, dropping it on his living room floor to find Donghyuck peering into his fish tank. “You upgraded,” Donghyuck notes when he straightens up. The apartment they shared was tiny and cramped. Donghyuck was clean enough that the space was manageable, but Taeil had a bad habit of bringing home every small thing that might bring joy. Rocks, leaves, bits of ribbon, figurines, and even on one notable occasion an entire box of kittens that Donghyuck was nearly beside himself rehoming.

This apartment has bigger windows, a fish tank, a guest bedroom, and no Donghyuck.

“It’s a lot different,” Taeil says.

Donghyuck straightens the beanie on his head and looks at Taeil without a word. He’s dressed in an oversized jacket and jeans that are ripped enough Taeil can make out the windchill on his knees. His t-shirt is tucked into his pants. His hair is fried at the edges.

Taeil is still a little in love with him.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“For what?” Donghyuck asks.

“For making you think I was proposing.”

Donghyuck laughs. It’s a small sound, not nearly as boisterous as it plays in Taeil’s memories, and he looks at the fish tank again so he won’t have to look Taeil in the eye. They were together long enough that Taeil knows the tells. “I won’t apologize for showing up at your doorstep.”

Taeil’s heart moves. Just a little. Just a small amount. “I wouldn’t make you apologize for that.” He swallows. “I...just thought that...since it was yours, that you should have it.”

“That was it?” Donghyuck shoves his hands in his pockets and he looks like the brassy young man that stormed up to Taeil in the bar five years ago asking for too much and not enough all at once. “Nothing else?”

“I think about you all the time, Donghyuck,” Taeil tells him as casually as he can. That is the only way he’ll survive this insect, he thinks. There are cracks in his heart and too many feelings might open the fissures one by one. “This time...I don’t think I thought enough.”

Donghyuck left for America for plenty of reasons: a better job, more opportunities, and freedom. Donghyuck was always talking about freedom. There’s less of that here, Taeil agrees, but it’s his home.

America didn’t have Taeil and Donghyuck went anyway.

Seoul is a lot dimmer without Donghyuck but Taeil never asked him to stay, not in any way that ever made a difference.

(When Taeil feels well enough to torture himself, he thinks of the nights he cried in Donghyuck’s laugh and drank too much and held too tight and wanted too hard, and how Donghyuck still left. But Taeil never said, “Donghyuck, don’t go,” and Donghyuck said, “Come with me,” so many times. The fault is a blurry line dug too deep into the earth.)

Taeil looks at the bag he dropped at his own feet. “That’s a large suitcase,” he says blithely.

Donghyuck’s chin jerks upwards. Always so stubborn. “There’s more coming.”

More.

“Were you…” Taeil swallows thickly. “Were you unhappy there?”

“There are a lot of places I can be happy,” Donghyuck says after a long moment. The apartment is too big. The echo is vast. Donghyuck still has his hands in his pockets and he still looks like the person Taeil knows but he feels different.

Taeil feels different and not in a good way. In a weak way, brittle, held together with glue. “I wasn’t…” He takes a deep breath. This is not how he expected to see Donghyuck again. He’s daydreamed about them meeting again at least ten times, when he lets himself. It’s always a little wistful, a little nostalgic, and a little hopeless. “I wasn’t waiting for you.”

“I wasn’t waiting for you, either.” Donghyuck tilts his head to the side. He takes his hat off and his hair flops in his face. He looks a little wild, like he might fit in on the other side of the world. His eyes narrow. “Are you seeing anyone?”

Taeil licks his lips. “No.” The apartment feels too empty.

(Maybe he was waiting a little.)

Donghyuck looks at the ring box in his hands with a stony expression. “Me, neither.”

Taeil takes a deep breath. “Do you have a place to stay?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh.”

“You have a guest bedroom, don’t you?”

“Oh.” Taeil blinks, runs a hand through his hair, thinks too hard. “Yeah.”

“This is the address I gave the movers, so.” Donghyuck bites his lip and looks back at the fish tank like it holds all the answers neither of them have. “Why do you always think too much about simple things and not enough about complicated things?”

Taeil laughs with a shrug. “It’s gotten me this far, hasn’t it?” It’s gotten Donghyuck at his doorstep with a ring in his hand. There are times when this is the pipe dream Taeil didn’t dare to think about. “I have...no complaints so far.”

“I do.” Donghyuck pointedly tucks the ring into the pocket of his jacket, out of sight, firmly in mind. “A whole year.”

“It wasn’t wasted,” Taeil says, because if that time was useless Taeil doesn’t think he could forgive himself. He doesn’t see how the time could be wasted at all when Donghyuck looks like a man, holds himself like a man, like he’s grown and knows what he wants and how to get it.

Donghyuck walks closer, his sock feet padding on the carpet. If Taeil had known the love of his life would be stopping by today perhaps he would have vacuumed. “It was a one way ticket,” Donghyuck tells Taeil, when he’s so close their lips might brush. “I’ll go back when I want to. Or when you want me to.”

Taeil swallows, smiles, and waits.

Donghyuck reaches down to pick up his suitcase, hand brushing Taeil’s both ways. He smells like airplane pretzels and cold wind and something else that Taeil remembers but can’t quite name. Donghyuck used to smell like honey because he used to smell like Taeil. “Hyung,” Donghyuck says, nearly a whisper, when they’re face to face again. “Do you want me here?”

There has never been another answer. Taeil grins. “I do.” Falters. “Do you...want to be here?” _With me? Here._

Donghyuck kisses Taeil’s cheek. His lips are cold, shredded, chapped, perfect. Taeil feels scruff on his skin. It’s something new. Something old. “I do.” Somehow, it’s that easy. He reaches in his pocket again and curls Taeil’s fingers around the velvet box. “You can borrow this.”

“Borrow?” Taeil feels like he can only breathe again when Donghyuck steps away, but he misses the close quarters. He misses feeling like he’s lost at sea. He clutches the box like an anchor, if only to stop himself from pulling Donghyuck back.

“It’s mine, isn’t it?” Donghyuck readjusts his grip on his blue suitcase and takes another step back. “Hold on to it.”

Taeil had always been an expert at holding on just a hair too long. He tucks the box into his pocket. “Okay.”

(Taeil isn’t good with words. He falls asleep that night wishing he was better with them, so he might have said something better, maybe said, “Donghyuck, don’t go,” and reset the timeline the way it was meant to be.

Somehow, despite not being good with words, the timeline reset anyway.)

Donghyuck walks into the guest bedroom, shoots Taeil a small and secret smile, and shuts the door.

Taeil takes his something borrowed and tucks it into his sock drawer and thinks, _this could be a good memory._

**Author's Note:**

> ( ˶˘ ³˘(⋆❛ ہ ❛⋆)!♡


End file.
